


Getting Out - Side B

by chameleonCharisma



Series: SCP: South Park [2]
Category: SCP Foundation, South Park
Genre: (since it's Kenny and all), Alternate Universe - SCP Foundation, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, repeated death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:21:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27446299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chameleonCharisma/pseuds/chameleonCharisma
Summary: Sometimes, in South Park, things happen.Kenny wants a way out.He's going to have to work for it.
Series: SCP: South Park [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/900762
Kudos: 16





	Getting Out - Side B

**Author's Note:**

> One day I will post something before November. This year is not that year! But I do appreciate all the returning (and in some cases repeated!) readers. For anyone new, hopefully this strikes a chord!
> 
> (Chronologically this happens before Side A, but it fits better in this order.)

There has never been any doubt in Kenny McCormick’s mind that something is wrong.

It’s nothing more than vague awareness, at first. Sometimes, in South Park, things happen. Every child knows that, even if the grownups only smile a little oddly when someone brings it up.

But for Kenny, everything comes to a head one spring in elementary school. 

He’d been down by the river with some classmates. He’d been jumping across the rocks in the water, trying to show off; he’d slipped, fallen in. The melt from the winter runoff had raised the water level and speed considerably. He had flailed and thrashed as the others screamed from the bank.

_bubbling breath, sound distant except for the roar of the rapids_  
_rushing, freezing water, unbearable force, unable to keep his head above the roiling surface_  
_tumbling, tumbling, water in his mouth, in his throat and lungs_  
_thrust to the bottom of the riverbed, dimly aware of the sensation of his skull crushing against the stones_

Kenny had awoken— painless, disoriented, in his own bed— screaming for his mother. 

His parents had managed to soothe him, eventually, insisted he’d had a bad dream, that he hadn’t even left the house that morning, that he’d stayed in bed when his classmates had come looking for him. 

His classmates tell the same story: he hadn’t felt well enough to go with them, hadn’t been down at the river at all. No, no one had fallen in, that would be dangerous; the river was so high right now, after all, so fast. You could get _killed_ in that current.

He wonders, presently, if that truly was the first time, or if it was simply the first time he remembered. It definitely wasn’t the last time it happened. It had just gotten worse once he became aware of it. 

One time after a snowstorm, one of the trees around the schoolyard had snapped under the weight of its overladen branches. Right as Kenny had been walking under it. 

One time a group of them had been tossing pennies onto the train tracks, hoping to flatten them under an approaching engine. His had been the only coin to come whizzing back, catching him in the eye like a bullet.

One time.

And another time.

And another, and another, and another.

He always wakes up in bed. Always untouched, as if he hadn’t left the house at all. 

As if nothing bad had ever happened.

Oh, he tries to get help, of course. He tries, he tries, he _tries_ to explain, and people don’t listen. It’s blamed on everything from nightmares, to mental illness, to his family being poor. “Just another McCormick,” they say as he gets older, “probably drunk out of his mind.”

The lack of caring was nothing new, but the understanding that no one seemed to _remember_ was what had finally broken him. 

Kenny has a vague memory of stealing a beer or two (or five) from his father, of breaking into the locked cabinet where the harder stuff was kept, of walking downtown to the high rise apartment buildings.

He remembers climbing up, up, up to the roof of one and thinking it had been a long way down, down, down—

(Unbeknownst to him, a woman woke, gasping, horrified, from a dream of a boy falling past her tenth floor window. It faded even as she reached out for him, as dreams are wont to do. She returned peacefully to sleep, fear forgotten.)

(Blood fades, too, but not like this.)

Kenny had startled awake in bed with a tightness in his chest and a nasty crick in his neck. He tried to tell himself the headache was from the alcohol and not the pavement. 

_blurred lights, the feeling of vertigo, and the feeling of the wind in his hair as he looked all the way down..._

He'd never touched another drop from his father’s cabinet.

With no support in South Park, Kenny decides his next best option is to leave.

One morning he makes a snap decision to hitch out of town. Packs a lunch, skips school, and thumbs a ride off one of the hunters on their way out into the woods.

The pickup truck breaks down right on the town boundary. The hunter laughs. “Ain’t that just the damndest thing!” he says. 

Kenny just swallows around a lump in his throat. He says he’ll walk the rest of the way. 

An hour later and he can’t seem to find the road anymore. It feels like the forest is closing in around him. 

The bushes to his left rustle, suddenly, and Kenny jumps aside as a deer bolts past him. There’s a sharp **CRACK** and his back lights up in a ragged sheet of pain.

He can’t breathe. Blood fills his mouth as he gasps and chokes, slumping numbly to the ground. 

He lasts long enough to hear the hunter from earlier scream: “Oh, _shit!_ ”

Kenny sits up gasping in bed. He coughs, and coughs, and _coughs_ until he retches, as if his body is trying to rid itself of the buckshot that isn’t there anymore; was maybe never there to begin with. There’s a part of him that wonders if he’d find his brown bag lunch if he went out searching in the woods on the town boundary. The thought makes his stomach clench, and this time he runs for the bathroom against the wave of nausea.

Every subsequent attempt to hitch out of town goes poorly.

He’s shot twice more in the woods before the week is out. One time they manage to get out on the highway, but his ride pulls over to help a stranded motorist with a flat tire. As Kenny leans in to assist, the jack kicks back nastily and the sharp edge of the bar catches him high in the jugular. Another time, a truck busts an axle right in front of the car, and the rusty rebar from the truck bed smashes through the windshield and decapitates him. 

Kenny stops trying when a semi blows through a stop sign at speed, and he wakes up in bed the next morning, but the man who picked him up doesn’t. 

It’s two weeks before he works up the nerve to steal his father’s beat-to-shit pickup truck. 

(Kenny can't get his license until the following spring, but he’s had to drive his parents’ drunk asses home enough times that they’ve taught him the basics.)

Creeping out in the wee hours of the morning, he lifts the key from his father’s jacket and clambers into the driver’s seat as quietly as he can. The truck is about ready for the junk heap, but damn if it doesn’t start on the first try. 

It really should have been his first warning sign.

While it’s quiet for a time, the truck starts to stall when he passes the “Now Leaving” sign. Kenny pumps the gas desperately, only for the truck to surge ahead, narrowly missing another vehicle. 

It can’t just be his imagination that fog is starting to creep in with the dawn.

Kenny doesn’t remember a lot of the drive. After the second near-miss with another car, everything fades into an adrenaline-fueled haze, relying entirely on jerky reflexes in the thick fog.

His vision snaps into focus, though, when he spots the sign for the police station in the next county over. He puts his foot down hard, urging the creaking truck forward, faster—

He t-bones a police cruiser in the parking lot. There are no airbags in the truck. His face smashes into the steering wheel with a sickening crunch.

But he’s not dead yet.

He’s bloody and half-conscious when he staggers into the police station, eyes swollen nearly shut, looking wildly into the faces of the alarmed staff. He’s not sure why they aren’t helping him. Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do? He’s going to die if they don’t help him. He just needs them to understand! Why won’t they just _listen to him, goddammit!?_ He’s screaming, the receptionist is screaming and the cops are screaming and the barrel of the gun is like a cold, dark eye—

_(bang)_

Kenny wakes up with a splitting headache. He’s never hated his bedroom so much in his entire life. 

At the breakfast table, his father is grousing about something, as usual. But then he mentions that some idiot stole his pickup truck and took it joyriding into a cop car. There had been a call from the police before Kenny got up, he says; they were towing it back at his expense.

(Kenny’s chest feels tight, and his hands go cold. His mother asks if he still isn’t feeling well, he just got awfully pale.)

The men who show up are no police Kenny has ever seen before. They’ve got sunglasses and black suits, and make less-than-furtive glances as they walk around, as if they’re constantly on-edge.

When his father starts yelling about the damage, Kenny leaves.

He isn’t really surprised when one of the men follows him into the yard. 

(He wonders if he is now a thing that happens in South Park.)

Out loud he wonders how they found him. No one else has ever noticed, ever even remembered, after all.

There had been a call to 911, the man tells him. A woman, screaming that a wild, panicked young man had come stumbling into the police station after a car crash, had been shot in the lobby in the chaos. That he was bleeding, possibly dying. That there was so, so much blood.

But then the woman’s voice had trailed off. Had become uncertain, confused. She didn’t seem to remember why she’d called. After a little while, neither did the 911 operator. And then, later, after they’d all hung up, neither did the man listening in over the wiretap. 

But they did still have a recording. And a description.

They want to know if Kenny needs help.

Kenny doesn’t know how to respond to that.

They tell him they’ll let him think about it. 

(He doesn’t want to think about it, but he remembers _falling, falling, blurring lights and windows rushing past his head..._ )

There’ve been more men in black suits in the streets lately. 

More than the usual amount, anyway. (Things do happen in South Park, after all.) 

Kenny sees a lot of them milling about as he walks back to school after lunch. (There had been a problem with the brake on the mower for the football field during the morning gym class. When he gets to school, his classmates tell him it was a miracle no one was hurt.)

After classes let out for the day, some of the men in black suits approach Kenny. They tell him they might have a way to help him.

Kenny thinks about lawn mowers, about the cold barrel of a police handgun, and hitchhiking, and finally, about the bottom of a river.

_about the high rise apartments downtown and the way the lights blurred from above_

When they ask him to come with them, he does not refuse.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Mental health is a bit in short supply this year, but I'm proud I was finally able to finish this one! I do want this to be a larger project, and I do plan to continue! Hopefully it won't take me another whole year, but I'm happy to know there's still people watching for it. :)


End file.
